You Need a Backup Bank

Backup banks and credit cards are a must and tools like YNAB make that even easier. You don’t have to use YNAB but consider using something as a layer on top of all your financial institutions.

YNAB lets me not care where my money lives or where I spend it from. I can easily store money in a HYSA and lose none of my tracking/budgeting tools. As long as there is enough money in my auto-pay source account then I’m good to go.

Late last year one of my banks closed down (HMBradley), I was using it primarily for its HYSA. YNAB made the whole process stupid easy and even after I lose access to the historical records for that bank (neo-bank/fintech org/whatever you want to call it) I will still have the full history in YNAB.

I used to rely on budgeting and tracking tools built into a single bank (Simple) but YNAB lets me not care about the UI/UX of my bank and use it as a big dumb envelope while I use YNAB to budget and plan.

Again, it doesn’t have to be YNAB, that’s just what I like and what worked for me.

You also need multiple credit cards.

I mostly use cash everywhere I go, but I have one credit card for autopay items, and another credit card for random purchases. I have a third card for temporary use should either of the first two cards be hit with fraud and I need to wait for a replacement card in the mail.

If you don't want to have multiple credit card accounts, you can often get a second card on the same account with a different name and use that one.

If you write checks, you should do that from a seperate account because everything someone needs to steal your money is written on the front of the check.

> How you bank can screw you over

This is the first heading 3 paragraphs into the article (note the typo in "you"). Do people ... not even read their own writing before publishing an article these days? I understand people don't want to "waste" money on editors but most random dev blogs have fewer typos than sites like this where content is _monetized_ through ads.

I bank with one of the main US companies and probably should look into using a second, but setting up credit cards etc. at each one seems like a bad idea...

IMO, this is why we should have basic banking through USPS or some other federal organization. I don't care what it costs or why private organizations with [clear histories of fraud](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wells_Fargo_cross-selling_scan...) are supposedly better. We should just have better nationalized banking offerings (airlines and healthcare too for that matter) and remove this problem altogether.

Absolutely. It's surprising that not everyone does this.

I have two bank accounts, each with a card and Apple pay. My "backup bank" costs about 3 euros / month for a simple payments account, savings and a creditcard.

My main creditcard is a separate Amex, but having a backup Visa card is useful also because Amex acceptance is still not great in Europe.

For less than 50 euros per year that's a lot of redundancy.

Also, you may lose your bank card randomly any time (lost wallet etc).

While waiting for the new card, having some cash at home and/or backup account with with a backup card at home can be useful.

On another note, alternate between two credit cards. I found out the hard way that cards that are classified as business cards are not reported to the ratings agencies even if they were acquired with your personal SS#. I cannot put into words my distaste for the way credit scores are being handled.

First world problems.

Failed state immigrants will kindly remind you that what you really need is a Backup Country, you just don't know it yet.

Affirmative

You need Gold not a second bank